If you’ve been following baseball over the last few years, you know that there’s been a pretty significant shift towards valuing defense within the game. The Rays, A’s, Red Sox, Mariners, and Blue Jays, among others, have made a point of putting quality gloves at as many positions as possible in order to keep their opponents from outscoring them.

However, at the same time that a bunch of teams were shifting their rosters towards run prevention, an interesting thing was happening up in Minnesota – the original pitching and defense organization decided to try something else.

For years, the Twins have practiced a very specific brand of baseball. Hit the ball on the ground to take advantage of the turf, run like the wind, bunt like crazy, manufacture runs, throw strikes, and play good defense. They didn’t have a single player hit 30 home runs in a season between 1988 and 2005, which is still one of the most amazing records you’ll ever see. Small ball, pitching, and defense – this was Twins baseball.

The 2010 Twins are not that kind of team, and if there was any doubt left about what the team was emphasizing this year, it was put to rest last night, when the Twins ran out the following line-up.

Denard Span, CF
J.J. Hardy, SS
Joe Mauer, C
Justin Morneau, 1B
Jim Thome, DH
Michael Cuddyer, 2B (!)
Jason Kubel, RF
Delmon Young, LF
Nick Punto, 3B

With regular starting second baseman Orlando Hudson unavailable, Ron Gardenhire’s Plan B was to take his starting right fielder and stick him at second base. He essentially chose the offensive production of Jason Kubel or Delmon Young over a more traditional defensive alignment that would have seen Brandan Harris play third, Punto at second, and Cuddyer in his normal right field spot.

When faced with the choice of offense (Kubel or Young) or defense (Punto at second, Cuddyer in right, and live with Harris at third), Gardy chose offense. It paid off, too, as Cuddyer, Kubel, and Young all slugged home runs and the Twins won their fifth consecutive game, pushing their lead in the A.L. Central to 4 1/2 games.

As much as we have talked up defensive value, the underlying point has always been that the goal is to outscore your opponent, and it doesn’t really matter how you do it. After decades of trying to beat their opponents 1-0, the Twins have finally decided to try putting together a roster of guys who can whack the baseball, and it’s working really well.

It’s just a little humorous that as baseball moves more towards the Twins model, the Twins are simultaneously moving away from it.

With May finishing up yesterday, I figured we’d convert the What We Learned series into a monthly recap, looking back at the more interesting stories over the last 31 days.

April hitting “breakouts” aren’t real.

We knew this already, but 2010 drove home the point repeatedly, as the first month of the season saw a lot of unexpected players performing extremely well, only to come crashing back to earth in May. Examples ahoy:

Kelly Johnson: .479 wOBA in April, .347 wOBA in May
Jose Guillen: .402 wOBA in April, .305 wOBA in May
Austin Kearns: .465 wOBA in April, .307 wOBA in May
Vernon Wells: .469 wOBA in April, .353 wOBA in May
Alex Gonzalez: .404 wOBA in April, .305 wOBA in May

These guys were heros in April, but their track records didn’t support that kind of performance, and sure enough, all of them got eaten alive by the regression monster. Even bad players can play well for a month – in general, it doesn’t mean anything.

April pitching “breakouts” might be real.

On the other hand, some pitchers showed some surprising early promise in April, and in many cases, they’ve kept pitching well as the season has rolled along. Again, examples:

Ricky Romero: 3.52 xFIP in April, 2.82 xFIP in May
Jaime Garcia: 3.70 xFIP in April, 3.76 xFIP in May
Carlos Silva: 4.12 xFIP in April, 3.59 xFIP in May
Doug Fister: 4.19 xFIP in April, 4.25 xFIP in May

As we saw with Cliff Lee a few years ago, there are times when a pitcher takes a huge step forward, and that becomes readily apparent at the beginning of the season. I wouldn’t bet on any of these guys winning their respective Cy Young awards, but for a guy like Romero, who is showing off a dramatically better set of skills than he had last year, it is quite likely that he will continue to outperform preseason expectations.

We should just stop writing off David Ortiz until he retires.

Ortiz in April: .143/.238/.286, routinely booed, talk of being released
Ortiz in May: .363/.424/.788, best hitter (non-Morneau division) in baseball

Speculating on whether Ortiz is just done has become an annual April tradition, as he’s terrible in the first month of the season three years in a row. He’s a big guy, the type of player who won’t age well, so there’s a built-in expectation that he’s going to just lose it and stop hitting one day. Every year, he starts the year slowly, and every year, people proclaim that this is the year that Ortiz is really finished. And every single year, he proceeds to absolutely pound the baseball afterwards.

Ortiz slumps at times, and of late, those slumps have come in April. He looks really bad when he’s playing poorly. But, if the last three years have taught us anything, it should be that we simply can’t tell when David Ortiz is actually done. Let’s save that talk for when he retires, eh?

Two weeks ago, David announced a new feature here at FanGraphs, aimed at giving you guys an opportunity to show off your capabilities. Our community blog has surpassed our expectations so far, as you guys have really stepped up and submitted some great stuff. Since there’s a a lot of content going up on FanGraphs on a daily basis, I wanted to highlight some of the community blog posts from the first couple of weeks, in case you missed them.

The first submission we published was from Daniel Moroz, and looked at Nick Markakis’ lack of power this year. Daniel did a great job of diving into the issue, using both data and images to help explain why Markakis has suddenly lost his ability to hit the ball over the wall. He followed this entry up with a later look at Adam Jones’ plate discipline, which was also very well done. Both articles came from his blog, Camden Crazies, which is clearly a must-read for any Orioles fan.

In a different vein than player analysis, “lincolndude” responded to a Tom Verducci article with a piece called Saving Baseball’s Charm. He looked at the way the game has changed over the years, looking at how different styles of baseball provide different value. It’s different than what normally goes up on FanGraphs, and that was one of the reasons I liked it.

A few days ago, “badenjr” took a stab at an always fun topic – Dusty Baker and pitch counts. He looked at how hard the Reds starters have been worked relative to the rest of the league, and showed that Baker may be at least somewhat reformed, as he’s not slagging his pitchers like he used to. The article gets extra points for use of pretty graphs.

Finally, yesterday’s submission from Mike Lee featured an interview with Padres GM Jed Hoyer, which touched on a variety of subjects and led to some pretty interesting answers. Based on the comments, this one was a winner as well. I will point out that any interviews, or articles containing a quote from any person, will be verified before they run.

These are just a few of the terrific posts that have gone up over at the community blog in the last two weeks. Keep them coming, and we’ll continue to feature the best ones here on the site. If your submission didn’t get approved, don’t get discouraged, and feel free to write something else up and submit it. If you’d like feedback on a piece you submitted that didn’t make the cut, you can email community@fangraphs.com, and we’ll do our best to explain why it didn’t get published.

Keep up the great work, everyone, and keep the great submissions rolling in.

Earlier this week, Steve Phillips went on Mike Francesca’s radio show and said that the Washington Nationals should consider trading Stephen Strasburg for Roy Oswalt. Predictably, every person who heard him say this did an instant face palm, and Phillips was roundly mocked for his comments.

I passed on writing about the comments for one main reason – I’ve done a decent amount of radio interviews over the last few years, and I know that sometimes, when asked a question on the air, you say stuff that you regret later. You don’t have time for measured responses or any kind of research, so if you haven’t put a lot of thought into a subject, you can say something that you soon discover is kind of foolish. It’s part of the medium, and so I’m generally willing to give people a pass for things they say in live broadcasts.

Given a few days to reflect on the comments and think the situation over, Phillips did what any reasonable human being would do and realized that his statement was utterly, entirely insane. Wait, what? He didn’t? Instead, he recorded a video where he actually stood his ground and reasserted the same point?

Seriously. You can watch it here.

The crux of the argument – prospects are risky, proven aces are rare, and when you have a chance to win, you have to go for it. On their own, all three points have some merit. Strasburg comes with a lot of risk. Oswalt is one of the better pitchers in baseball. There is a big financial payoff for doing well in October. (For the purposes of this post, we’ll ignore the massive difference in costs that both players would incur, as Phillips does, and simply evaluate this from a talent perspective – once you include contracts, the entire thing becomes laughable, and no one needs it laid out how the differences in salary and team control make this one of the dumbest ideas ever.)

However, this line of thought shows the flaw of analysis by cliche, rather than by measuring the value of individual assets. If you follow Phillips path to its logical extent, you could justify trading nearly any prospect for almost any major league player, as long as your team was in contention. Any marginal upgrade for a winning team could justify a complete pillaging of a team’s farm system, because, after all, “prospects get a GM fired.”

In reality, Phillips is simply displaying an extreme reliance on one of the great myths of baseball – the reliability of the proven veteran. His assertion that you know what you’re going to get from Oswalt, while Strasburg is just a big riddle wrapped inside a mystery, is the kind of thinking that has been chased out of baseball over the last 10 years.

It’s not that prospects aren’t risky. They are. However, major league players, especially pitchers, are almost equally risky. Just take a look at how last year’s aces are performing so far this year. Zack Greinke, Felix Hernandez, Dan Haren, and Javier Vazquez were among the best pitchers in the game in 2009, and have all struggled (to different degrees) so far this year. Jake Peavy, proven veteran ace, has been a disaster for the White Sox. Ask the Red Sox how their investments in Josh Beckett and John Lackey have gone this year, or query the Braves about Derek Lowe. And we’re not even talking about the guys who have gone down to injuries and aren’t even pitching right now.

Yes, it’s just two months, and we should expect each of those pitchers to perform better going forward than they have so far in 2010. However, we cannot ignore the significant variance in pitcher performance, especially in just a few month’s worth of starts, no matter how long and impressive the resume of a pitcher may be. Roy Oswalt may pitch well for his new team, but it’s nothing close to a sure thing, and he’s not even that much more of a sure thing than the kid who has never pitched in the majors.

This is the mistake that bad general managers have been making for years – significantly overestimating the reliability of veteran players. It’s the kind of misunderstanding of projected player performance that Phillips mastered as a GM. Steve thinks prospects gets GMs fired, but in reality, its misinformed opinions about how to build a baseball team, much like the one he’s espousing right now.

Last night, I headed over to Zebulon, North Carolina to take in a game between the West Tennessee Diamond Jaxx and Carolina Mudcats. West Tenn features a significant amount of Seattle’s better prospects, including Dustin Ackley, Carlos Triunfel, Alex Liddi, and last night’s starter, Mauricio Robles. Carolina features… not much at all. There were quite a few jokes made about the Mudcats roster over the night, as the Reds Double-A team doesn’t have much talent this year.

However, in the eighth inning, they brought in someone of interest. Baseball America’s Conor Glassey, sitting to my left, informed me that the kid warming up in the bullpen had some serious arm strength from the left side. After Ruben Medina walked the world, the Mudcats brought in Philippe Valiquette to get the final out of the eighth. He didn’t disappoint.

A slender 6’0 lefty, Valiquette came in and started firing 96 and 97 MPH fastballs with relative ease. He got Triunfel to ground out to the second baseman, and the inning was over. Valiquette came back out for the ninth to go through the middle of West Tennessee’s order. This time, he decided not to mess around, and brought out the big guns.

You don’t see legit 100s on the radar gun from the left side very often. It was, to the say the least, an impressive fastball.

The command wasn’t great and the secondary stuff was borderline awful, but the fastball was enough for him to make hitters look foolish. Given the velocity, I figured when I checked his career minor league line upon returning home that he’d be running big strikeout totals at the least. To my surprise, he’s only racked up 245 strikeouts in 311 innings pitched over six minor league seasons, and his second trip through Double-A isn’t going very well this year. The walks aren’t a big surprise, but I was shocked to see that he’s been this ineffective in the low minors with a huge fastball.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Sergio Santos and how easy his conversion to pitching has been. Consider Valiquette to be the counter point to my argument that relieving is pretty easy if you have a good arm. There’s no doubting the arm strength that he brings to the mound, but to date, he hasn’t converted it into getting hitters out.

Just 23, there’s still plenty of time for him to figure out how to command his fastball and develop a second pitch to complement it and give hitters a different look, but so far, he’s just all velocity and nothing else.

With Carl Crawford set for a large raise when he becomes eligible for free agency this winter, there has been a school of thought that the Rays might deal their star left fielder this summer in order to extract value for him before he leaves this winter. However, with the team atop the AL East, it seems unlikely (to say the least) that the Rays would deal one of their best players, and the team has publicly stated that they’ll do whatever they can to keep him, though they obviously can’t compete with the big payroll teams if one comes calling with a few barrels of cash.

However, I wonder whether we’ve been speculating about the wrong outfielder that the Rays may put on the block this summer. With B.J. Upton struggling once again, perhaps he’s the toolsy OF that Tampa Bay will dangle this summer.

While he’s always possessed star potential, Upton’s disappointing 2009 season was one of the reasons the Rays weren’t able to repeat as a playoff team last year. He’s shown no improvement this year, as he continues to get himself out by chasing pitches out of the strike zone. The result – a .210/.285/.370 line that gives him a well below average .301 wOBA, not that different from the .310 wOBA he posted a year ago. After drawing walks in 15 percent of his at-bats in 2008, that number fell to 9 percent last year and has remained there this year. While Upton does have power and speed, he doesn’t use either well enough to compensate for a poor approach at the plate. After what looked like real improvement in pitch selection two years ago, it’s been nothing but regression ever since.

For the last year and a half, Upton has essentially been an average baseball player, with his value mostly coming from his glove in center field. However, with his second trip through arbitration coming up at the end of the season, he’s no longer cheap enough for the Rays to sit around and hope he lives up to his talent level. They’re paying him $3 million this year, and that will likely go to $5 or $6 million next winter. For the Rays, that’s a significant amount of the budget, and money that could potentially be offered to Carl Crawford if Upton wasn’t around.

While trading a guy who was a +4 win player in both 2007 and 2008, and doesn’t turn 26 until August, is certainly a pretty big risk, the Rays may have to decide whether they’d have rather have Crawford or Upton going forward. They almost certainly can’t have both, and Crawford’s the one that is actually making them a good team right now. Instead of shipping off the star player who does everything well, perhaps Andrew Friedman and company should consider shopping the underachiever who is reaching the point of his career where he’s no longer cheap or all that young. There would certainly be a market for Upton, as teams will always take chances on that kind of talent, and the Rays would be able to replace him far easier than they could replace Crawford.

Given their budget, Tampa Bay won’t have that many chances to win it all. If it costs them the potential of B.J. Upton to keep the present of Carl Crawford, that may very well be a trade worth making.

Come hang out with Patrick Newman and myself for a fun filled hour of baseball talk, both domestic and foreign. Also, a reminder that RotoGraphs hosts the fantasy chat every Friday, and Marc Hulet’s gang is far smarter than I when it comes to all things fantasy baseball, so your questions in that vein will be better answered over there.

A list:

Mel Ott, 1929: .328/.449/.635, 172 wRC+
Alex Rodriguez, 1996: .358/.414/.631, 169 wRC+
Ted Williams, 1939: .327/.436/.609, 168 wRC+
Al Kaline, 1955: .340/.421/.546, 160 wRC+
Frank Robinson, 1956: .290/.379/.558, 149 wRC+
Mickey Mantle, 1952: .311/.394/.530, 166 wRC+

In the history of baseball, those are the six seasons where a player has posted an OPS over .900 as a 20-year-old. Of those six players, five are in the hall of fame, and the other guy will be when he’s done playing.

To say that Jason Heyward is putting himself in some pretty impressive company might be the understatement of the year. And yet, here he is, a 20-year-old rookie putting up a .290/.409/.580 line for the season (166 wRC+), and showing absolutely no signs of slowing down.

In April, Heyward flashed some greatness but also looked young and inexperienced. He struck out 26 times in 89 trips to the plate, and while the walks and home runs still made him a valuable player, there was a pretty easy path to getting him out.

In May, he has 70 plate appearances and just five strikeouts. He hasn’t lost any aggressiveness, as he’s still drawn 12 walks, and his power is still there, as 10 of his 20 hits have gone for extra bases. In his second month in the big leagues, he’s hitting .357/.471/.661, good for a .481 wOBA.

Again, he’s 20 years old. Even the greatest players of all time have struggled to be impact players at age 20. Ken Griffey Jr hit .300/.366/.481. Willie Mays hit .274/.356/.472. Hank Aaron hit .280/.322/.447.

This is an astounding performance from a rookie, the best we’ve seen since Albert Pujols took baseball by storm in 2001. He hit .329/.403/.610 as a 21-year-old. Heyward is matching that performance, only doing it a year earlier in his career. He still has to keep it up for another four months, of course, but if anything, he’s gotten better as the season has gone along.

The hype surrounding Heyward was intense, but it apparently wasn’t intense enough. We’re in the midst of watching one of the great rookie seasons of all time from a player whose peers are still working out the kinks in A-ball.

One of the things I remember loving about baseball as I grew up, learning the intricacies of the game, was that a batter who struck out four times in a game was referred to as wearing The Golden Sombrero. It’s exactly the kind of thing that convinced me that this wasn’t just a game, but a different world entirely.

This year, 30 golden sombreros have been handed out, the most recent going to Ryan Ludwick of the Cardinals. Rather than being embarrassed, the list of players who have whiffed four times in a night this season is actually quite impressive – Nelson Cruz, Justin Morneau, David Wright, Justin Upton, and even the mythical creature Jason Heyward have all performed the feat.

Besides being gifted with a free hat, these guys all have something else in common; in one night, they matched the season strikeout total of one David Eckstein.

The unsung hero of the 2010 Padres, Eckstein is having a season that is as bewildering as it is valuable. At age 35, he’s hitting .310/.370/.405, each of which would represent a career high if he was able to sustain this pace all season. And he’s doing it by hitting everything he swings at.

Always a high contact hitter, Eckstein has upped his game in the first two months of 2010. His rate of contact on pitches in the zone is 97.2 percent, but where he really shines is on pitches out of the zone, where he’s making contact 90 percent of the time. Even when pitchers get him to chase a ball out of the zone, Eckstein is putting the bat on it, either fouling it off or putting it in play. He’s swung and missed just 2.1 percent of the time, making it nearly impossible for pitchers to put him away.

Eckstein is on pace to strike out just 14 times all season long, and his offensive approach is invoking that of another San Diego legend. Perhaps most remarkably, he hasn’t even had to sacrifice the bit of power he does have, as his 13 extra base hits are nearly half of what he had in all of 2009.

When listing reasons why the Padres are surprising everyone by hanging around in the NL West, don’t forget to spread the credit Eckstein’s way. His success at slap hitting has given the Padres a valuable second baseman for the first two months of the season, even if its coming through highly unconventional means.

Let’s see if we can get through this week without someone making a crack about small sample size.

Maybe we should drug test the third base bag at the Skydome.

Last week, we wrote up Jose Bautista’s power surge in the things we learned in week six. Bautista had been manning third base for the Blue Jays, but has now shifted back to the outfield due to the return of Edwin Encarnacion. After Encarnacion’s week, we may have to begin asking just what kind of magic Toronto has lathered their third base bag with.

In his first week off the DL, Encarnacion managed seven hits in 22 plate appearances. More impressively, six of them left the yard. The Jays have now gotten 17 home runs from their third baseman this year, easily the most in baseball. Their hot corner bats have produced a ridiculous .683 slugging percentage, 90 points ahead of the second place Rays, who have some guy named Evan Longoria playing the position.

The Blue Jays offense was supposed to be pretty miserable, but thanks to some crazy power surges, they’ve managed to keep putting runs on the board. Tune in next week to find out what new marginally useful Toronto player is doing a Babe Ruth impression.

B.J. Upton wants to be like Rickey.

Upton didn’t have a particularly good performance over the last seven days, hitting just .154 in 29 trips to the plate. However, he did do something fairly remarkable – steal five bases despite a paucity of opportunities.

Upton racked up four hits on the week, but one of those was a home run and two were doubles. With just one single and three walks, Upton only earned his way onto first base four times in the whole week. And he still managed five steals.

On May 17th, he walked and stole second. On April 18th, he doubled and stole third. On April 19th, he singled, stole second and then stole third. And on May 22nd, he walked and stole second. Talk about making the most of what you’ve got.

The Twins strike-throwing ways are getting ridiculous.

Everyone knows the Twins have a pitching staff full of guys who just pound the strikezone, but they got even crazier last week. 13 pitchers took the hill for Minnesota in the last seven days, and of those, only Francisco Liriano walked more than one batter. They issued 13 walks in 63 innings pitched, a rate of 1.86 BB/9.

However, being around the plate that much has its downsides, as they allowed 12 home runs, third most in the majors over the last week. Minnesota’s commitment to their philosophy is noble, but it also wouldn’t kill them to waste one out of the zone every once in a while.